dannycorker Wrote:Hi all - I currently have two 2TB externals and a 1TB, and find myself very short on space. After reading around unRAID seems to be a solid bet, but I have a few problems. The first is that I've never actually built a PC before (although I am pretty tech savvy and think I should be able to do it easily enough). The second is that I live in the UK and every parts list or recommendation I find seems to only be available in the US. Thirdly, I'm a student, and never have too much money at any time - I have often planned to buy parts in the past but have found them discontinued over here by the time I have the money! My biggest problem I think is that I don't know too much about unRAID and computer hardware, and I'm not sure where to start. If anyone could nudge me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful. I'm hoping to have an unRAID PC built by January or February next year, which is about the time I think I'll run out of my current space. So I'm all ears if anyone has some advice!

Bumping in case it was missed - really want to build an unRAID, just need a nudge in the right direction. Would be much easier if I lived in the US :/

dannycorker Wrote:Bumping in case it was missed - really want to build an unRAID, just need a nudge in the right direction. Would be much easier if I lived in the US :/

Do you have any existing hardware that you plan to use or will this be a completely new build? I say this because now is not a very good time to be purchasing HDDs ($$$) due to the floods in Thailand. You could use your existing external drives but you would have to remove them from the enclosures because you cannot use external drives in the array and you will lose any data that is currently on them.

I'm in the US so I don't have the first clue about where to get hw in the UK. Where do you shop for hw?

I think you first should decide on what kind of hw you need. Is this going to be a basic media server? What kind of apps do you plan to run (SAB/SB/CP)? If you're not sure then the no brainer build is just get a dual core CPU (like an Intel G530 or G620).

I would also suggest that you check out the unraid forums because I have seen UK specific builds listed over there in the past. I don't know if they are kept up to date but I've seen them.

Gotta say great guide eskro! I went with the 12drive with a few modifications snice I had a spare case laying around I had an extra $50 for some upgrades . Just starting out with 3 drives and unRAID basic for now. I'm hoping to get some good deals on 2TB drives for the holidays then ill upgrade to 12 drives and unRAID Pro.

I just built myself an unraid box, and i have to say i'm really happy, it's a great bit of kit and well worth the money i payed for the Plus license, i will be upgrading to Pro when i need to expand it further.

Unraid fits the bill perfectly, I tried out Flexraid first, but things didn't go that smoothly, it's was then that i realized it was one guy behind it, and trusting 5TB of data to essentially beta software freaked me out.

The support forums are great to, the hero members are very helpful and don't belittle you for asking stupid questions, which I'm sure I've done many times

I now have it hidden away in a spare room and have it go into S3 sleep after 15min of the last disk spinning down and wake it using XBMC's WOL addon......priceless

Below are some answers to questions asked in some of the previous posts, the first two are some of the methods i used to get data onto my array, but are NOT necessarily the way that is recommend, but they worked for me.

' Wrote:I only have 1 extra drive so should i let unraid "install" this drive and then load up media from drive 2 on it then put drive 2 in and "install" and so on. At that point all my media is on the drives in unraid and Im left with 1 blank drive and I make that my parity correct?

Yes, you can do it this way, i needed to do it this way as i only had one empty drive. but it's recommended to start adding data to the array with the parity disk enabled.

' Wrote:whats the best way to transfer the files over? do i hook the drive up internally, externally or copy over the network?

Yes, you can mount a ntfs formated drive internally outside the array and use midnight commander to move files across to one of the unraid disks, but you can only use this method for ntfs and ext2 formatted disks, all my disks were ext4 Doh! so what i did was boot into ubuntu with a live cd, mount one of my unraid formated disks (ReiserFS) as well as my ext4 disk(s) and move data across, only problem i encountered was that some folders had there permissions changed and were hidden, easily changed with midnight commander, otherwise moving data across the network with the parity disk enabled is the best way.

' Wrote:I live in the UK and every parts list or recommendation I find seems to only be available in the US.

I don't think you'll have any problems finding suitable hardware in the UK, just make sure you do plenty of reading in the hardware section on the unraid forum, and post what you settle on in the forum so the experts can give it a once over before you spend your money, I get most of my hardware from scan.co.uk but there are plenty of others, like overclockers.co.uk, but if you've never built a PC from scratch it can be a bit daunting, you can always use an old desktop, then all you need to do is add the hard drives and plug in the unraid usb.

Thanks Eskro and poofyhairguy for putting all this together and answering so many questions. Really makes shopping much easier.

I have decided to add an unRaid server to my soon to be built XBMC (waiting for case on backorder from NCIX)

I am building it exactly like option 1 - 6HDD the only thing I am going to change is the processor and the ram. I would like to run the SabNZBD, CP and SB combo on it. So I decided to up the processor to dual core and use 4mb of ram, I actually was going to go with 2gb but it was hard to find a match.

So here are the 2 pieces I am changing, would like to know if they will work with unRaid build #1 from the first post.

I'm curious how you guys are setting up your stuff.. I just setup mine last night and I'm trying to think what would be the best way to have it setup.. Just 1 big share with Movies and TV is ideally what I wanna do.. But wouldn't scraping take a long time if my collection is around 10TB?

I only have 2+2TB (parity) in there now.. I have about 10TB of data to move over, then move the HDDs over one by one..